Known in Chinese as Hua-yen and in Japanese as Kegon-kyo, the Avatamsaka Sutra, or Flower Ornament Scripture, is held in the highest regard and studied by Buddhists of all traditions. Through its structure and symbolism, as well as through its concisely stated principles, it conveys a vast range of Buddhist teachings. This one-volume edition contains Thomas Cleary's definitive translation of all thirty-nine books of the sutra, along with an introduction, a glossary, and Cleary's translation of Li Tongxuan's seventh-century (...) guide to the final book, the Gandavyuha, "Entry into the Realm of Reality.". (shrink)

A central feature of our waking mental experience is that our attention naturally toggles back and forth between “external” and “internal” stimuli. In the midst of an externally demanding task, attention can involuntarily shift internally with no clear reason how or why thoughts momentarily shifted inward. In the case of external attention, we are typically exploring and encoding aspects of our external world, whereas internal attention often involves searching for and retrieving potentially relevant information from our memory networks. Cognitive science (...) has traditionally focused on understanding forms of internal and external attention separately, leaving a mystery about what sparks the seemingly automatic shifts between the two. Specifically, what shifts attentional focus from being outward‐directed to being inward‐directed? We present a candidate mechanism: Familiarity‐detection. (shrink)

John Cleary, Pádraig Hogan; The Reciprocal Character of Self-Education: Introductory Comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Address ‘Education is Self-Education’, Jou.

John J. Cleary was an internationally recognised authority in ancient Greek philosophy. This volume of penetrating studies of Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus, philosophy of mathematics, and ancient theories of education, display Cleary’s range of expertise and originality of approach.

Introduction IN RECENT YEARS there has developed in the West considerable interest in the philosophy of Hua-yen Buddhism, a holistic, Unitarian approach to ...

Cleary experiments with a “community of inquiry” to his high school Intro-level Philosophy course to express an alternative method for ethics through various poems and writing exercises such as “War and a Soldier” by Edgar Jablons, “Murder” by Paul Silverman, and “The Beaten Path” by Sylvia Schneider.

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 : 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment (...) in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478, allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256, and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281, rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, it is argued that Popper’s understanding of Plato’s notion of freedom is fundamentally flawed because he begins with the unexamined assumptions of modern liberalism. Subsequently, in the second section, it is shown through philological analysis that the ancient notion of freedom must be understood primarily in terms of a social and political condition that is the opposite of slavery or of living under a tyranny. Finally, the third section of the paper considers Plato’s (...) criticism of the demotic notion of freedom, as well as the dialectical strategy through which he subsumes it under his aristocratic ideal of freedom as rational self-control. (shrink)

Background: After their attempts to have patient safety concerns addressed internally were ignored by wilfully blind managers, nurses from Bundaberg Base Hospital and Macarthur Health Service felt compelled to ‘blow the whistle’. Wilful blindness is the human desire to prefer ignorance to knowledge; the responsibility to be informed is shirked. Objective: To provide an account of instances of wilful blindness identified in two high-profile cases of nurse whistleblowing in Australia. Research design: Critical case study methodology using Fay’s Critical Social Theory (...) to examine, analyse and interpret existing data generated by the Commissions of Inquiry held into Bundaberg Base Hospital and Macarthur Health Service patient safety breaches. All data was publicly available and assessed according to the requirements of unobtrusive research methods and secondary data analysis. Ethical considerations: Data collection for the case studies relied entirely on publicly available documentary sources recounting and detailing past events. Findings: Data from both cases reveal managers demonstrating wilful blindness towards patient safety concerns. Concerns were unaddressed; nurses, instead, experienced retaliatory responses leading to a ‘social crisis’ in the organisation and to whistleblowing. Conclusion: Managers tasked with clinical governance must be aware of mechanisms with the potential to blind them. The human tendency to favour positive news and avoid conflict is powerful. Understanding wilful blindness can assist managers’ awareness of the competing emotions occurring in response to ethical challenges, such as whistleblowing. (shrink)

To judge people's true character, pay careful attention to what they do, not to what they say; to develop human resources successfully, first develop your own skills and resources; be exacting without being needlessly demanding; and don't dwell on the present but always look to future goals. These are just a few of the insights revealed in this basic course on how to recognize, organize, and develop human resources. Drawing on essential sources - such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, (...) and the I Ching - Thomas Cleary shows what today's business executives, personnel managers, and political leaders can learn from these ancient Asian traditions about the inner dynamics of human interaction. Among the selections are passages from an important but less well-known work, The Thirty-six Strategies, which summarizes the powerful techniques of the Asian "art of advantage". Also provided are short, accessible introductions to Confucianism, Taoism, The Art of War, and the I Ching, along with lists of resources for further reading. (shrink)

Many legal arguments pertaining to equal rights for gay and lesbian families have relied upon empirical research on the `healthy' childraising environment of these families. While neither disputing recent legal gains nor diminishing their importance, this article looks at some of the conceptual categories that drive this research. The limitations of such research, as salutary as it is, are typically understood in terms of their obvious political context. Such research avoids highlighting any differences between gay/lesbian families and traditional families because (...) an emphasis on such differences feeds cultural stereotypes that are damaging to non-traditional families. This article takes a different tack, looking at how the concepts that frame research are based in binaries and fantasies about families and sex that we argue are too limiting. It assumes that the elision of sexuality within such studies is symptomatic of a broader repression of a variety of meanings of family. In response, the article brings in queer theory and psychoanalysis to broaden our approach to understanding new forms of family and kinship initiated by gay and lesbian families. The article addresses single household lesbian families that are most frequently the object of empirical research. (shrink)

This book propels the study of American revolutionary and radical Thomas Paine into the twenty-first century by engaging an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars in an exploration of Paine's role in politics, literature, and the invention of the global.

Honor, fearlessness, calm, decisive action, strategic thinking, and martial prowess have been the hallmarks of the Japanese samurai culture through the ages. Their ethos is known as bushido, or the way of the warrior-knight. Here is an insider’s view of the samurai—their moral and psychological development, the ethical standards they strive to uphold, their training in both martial arts and strategy, and the enormous role that the traditions of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism had in influencing their ideals. Thomas (...) class='Hi'>Cleary has collected writings on bushido by warriors, scholars, political advisors, and educators from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries that provide a comprehensive, historically rich view of samurai life and education. The selections deal with a broad range of subjects—from military strategy and political science to personal discipline and character development. Cleary includes an introduction to each piece, putting it into historical context and presenting biographical information about the authors. This is an essential read for martial artists and anyone interested in samurai history, but it will also appeal to readers in the fields of government, military, religion, and education. (shrink)

When clinical services aspire to quality improvement, creative and innovative approaches to old problems are needed to drive such change. Whilst new ef orts should be applauded, information on this topic can be somewhat grey from an ethical and research point of view. Within the mental health profession there is currently an expectation to routinely evaluate care and disseminate i ndings. The notion of service enhancements under the guise of routine practice is an interesting and untested ethical issue. Should clinical (...) innovation continue to enjoy such impunity as patient autonomy is often compromised as they are often compelled to accept treatment under the coercion of mental health legislation? We believe that it should not. All involvement in any form of research is voluntary, thus patients should also have the right to decline participation in quality projects if they wish to do so. (shrink)

This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato and Aristotle. It covers such themes as Plato on recollection and on justice, along with Aristotle on Nous and on law._ This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here_ for details.

Existentialism and Romantic Love investigates the thinking of five existential philosophers (Max Stirner, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir) to uncover fresh insights about what is wrong with our everyday ideas about romantic loving, why reality often falls short of the ideal, sources of frustrations and disappointments, and possibilities for creating authentically meaningful relationships.

Anthony Everett has argued that fictional realism entails that there are metaphysically indeterminate identity facts and that there are true contradictions. Ross Cameron and Brendan Murday independently reply to Everett’s arguments by proposing a view on which fictional realism entails merely linguistic indeterminacy and does not entail true contradictions. While I agree with the idea behind Murday’s and Cameron’s view, the specific details have some undesirable consequences about sentences containing an ‘according to the fiction’ operator. Furthermore, they cannot give a (...) uniform semantics for sentences containing an ‘according to the fiction’ operator. I will offer a friendly amendment to Murday’s and Cameron’s view that avoids these undesirable consequences and has a uniform semantics. I will then extend Murday’s and Cameron’s reply by replacing a principle that Everett relies on in posing his objections with a new principle. This new principle will go some way toward meeting a challenge posed by Everett to provide adequate criteria of identity for fictional characters. (shrink)

Cleary experiments with a “community of inquiry” to his high school Intro-level Philosophy course to express an alternative method for ethics through various poems and writing exercises such as “War and a Soldier” by Edgar Jablons, “Murder” by Paul Silverman, and “The Beaten Path” by Sylvia Schneider.

Cleary discusses the origin, development, and use of the many senses of priority as a central thesis in Aristotle’s metaphysics. Cleary contends that one of the most revealing problems for the ambiguity of Aristotle’s relationship to Platonism is that of the ontological status of mathematical objects. In support of his claim, Cleary analyzes a curious passage from Aristotle’s _Topics, _where he appears to accept a schema of priorities that makes mathematical entities more substantial than sensible things. How (...) does Aristotle try to reconcile the ordering of things dictated by sciences like mathematics and dialectic with the ordering of sense experience upon which his own physics and metaphysics are based? To find the answer, Cleary reviews three different outlines of the many senses of priority given by Aristotle himself and found in _Categories _12-13, _Metaphysics _Delta 11, and _Metaphysics _Theta 8. Cleary suggests there is an implicit hierarchy for Aristotle that leads him to posit the Prime Mover at its apex as complete actuality and, therefore, as the focus for the concept of priority. Having reviewed Aristotle’s treatment of the many uses of priority, Cleary demonstrates how the concept is used in some typical arguments by Aristotle for his mature metaphysical positions. (shrink)

In acute inpatient mental health services, patients commonly demonstrate extreme behaviours. A number of coercive practices, such as locked doors, enforced medication and seclusion, are used in these settings to control such behaviours. The aim of this report is to explore briefly some of the contemporary debates pertaining to seclusion. A perusal of the literature reveals a clarion call to end the practice of seclusion, without consideration of feasible alternatives. It is hoped that this brief report will encourage further evidence-based (...) discussion and research initiatives on this important ethical topic. (shrink)

Narcissistic personality disorder describes people who demonstrate an exaggerated sense of entitlement, lack empathy and crave admiration. But philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that, even if a person isn't a pathological narcissist, narcissism can be a strategy that some people use to help them cope with being undervalued. Through examples such as singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, I show how Beauvoir's philosophy gives us a framework to understand some narcissistic behaviour and possibilities for more authentic ways of being in the world.

This research note is the eighth instalment in our series of preliminary findings on the census and study of the reception of De iure belli ac pacis. The note presents a bibliographical description of Laurentius’ 1647 re-issue of the 1631 edition by Blaeu, considers Laurentius’ motivation and methods of production, lists and maps the currently known twenty-three surviving copies, and briefly describes two notable exemplars.

In Hang The DJ, Amy and Frank meet via an online dating system that promises that if you stick with it, it will continue gathering information until it finds your soul mate, or “ultimate compatible other,” trumpeting a 99.8% success rate. In this chapter we explore the broad issue of digital relationships from the point of view of two particular philosophies of life: Stoicism and existentialism. The episode raises a multiplicity of philosophical issues concerning the choices we make about romantic (...) love. For example, does finding a perfect match really boil down to a formula? And if we could find such a formula, would that be a good way to find love? These two philosophical approaches help us to answer the question as to whether we should be relegating the task of finding a mate to computer algorithms. (shrink)

This research note offers a contextual overview of the printing history of Johann Blaeu’s 1646 octavo edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (ibp). The note examines the printing process of the last edition that was prepared while Grotius was still alive, though it was published after his death. The note also sheds light on the theological dimension of some readers’ annotations, and concludes by discussing the impact this edition had on the modern versions of the text.

We propose that IAM and déjà vu may not share a placement on the same gradient, per se, but the mechanism of cue familiarity detection, and a major differentiating factor between the two metacognitive experiences is whether the resulting inward directed search of memory yields retrieved content or not. Déjà vu may manifest when contentless familiarity detection is inexplicable by the experiencer.

This chapter focuses on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote a great deal on sexual love and friendship, to help us understand Doctor Stephen Strange's relationship challenges. Nietzsche thought that sexual love is a distraction from more important things, like being a superhero. For Strange, it is actually his narcissism that is holding him back the most. It is not only Strange's brilliance and passion for wisdom that are reminiscent of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, but also his flirtation with nihilism. The (...) problem that Doctor Strange, Nietzsche, and Zarathustra all face: forming meaningful loving relationships. Nietzsche never had a girlfriend and he never married. While Nietzsche knew his philosophy would not be for everyone, he hoped that a few brave people would understand the virtues of striving toward the ideal of the Ubermensch. For Nietzsche, great friends help one another to become better people through “a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them”. (shrink)

This Australian university case study explores the transition to emergency, remote teaching (ERT) in an intensive Block Model curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic. An online survey investigated academics’ experiences of factors that helped or hindered their transition. A thematic analysis of the data revealed a symbiotic relationship between the Block Model curriculum, professional learning, and academics’ sense of agency as they experienced their transition. We relate our findings to Whittle et al.’s 2020 framework and propose an extended framework based on (...) how teaching was influenced by the changed environment. Drawing on the extended framework, we propose lessons for the future based on how academics were reflectively adapting to ERT. In the four-week Block Model, lessons were learned and applied in the subsequent Block. Critical lessons relevant to higher education institutions include increasing diversity of effective, un-invigilated assessment types, and fostering student wellbeing by facilitating learning spaces where students connect with peers and academics. Furthermore, academics need connections with peers and safe spaces in which to debrief on evolving situations and build confidence in using new learning technologies. Professional learning fostering an emergency-informed, safe learning environment effectively reduces isolation and better prepares institutions for future emergencies. (shrink)

In this paper the author discusses the complex question of whether Proclus regards theology as a demonstrative science along the lines of Euclidean geometry, or as a different kind of science that follows the dialectical model of Plato's Parmenides. This question is focused by considering the applicability to the Elements of Theology of the Euclidean model of science, while examining the limitations of this hermeneutical approach.

El presente trabajo intentará aproximarse críticamente a la revisión del concepto del “poder” en relación a los valores del hombre, a partir de las teorías desarrolladas por tres maestros universales clásicos de las ciencias sociales y psicoanalíticas como fueron Max Weber, Sigmund Freud y Hans Kelsen. Nuestra hipótesis consiste en afirmar que los aportes teóricos de estos tres autores conservan su validez hasta la actualidad y enriquecen las tesis derivadas del “nuevo paradigma científico” con respecto a las actuales formas de (...) organización del “poder” en redes. Sobre todo en lo que respecta a su doble abordaje acerca del “poder”: el análisis de sus estructuras y el origen de los valores que lo sustentan desde sus bases antropológicas. Al concluir se reflexiona acerca de la validez de este pensamiento para la historia moderna de América Latina. (shrink)